Today has been a really long day, and a very good one. I am tired, and it is a good tired. When I woke this morning, I had no idea what the day would bring. I thought perhaps I would start as I often do with a time of meditation. Then perhaps I would have my coffee and work on a brochure I’m creating for a friend’s business. Then in the midst of those thoughts, I completely changed my plans for the day. I decided to take the hour drive up to my daughter’s apartment to help her put together her loft bed. So after making myself a to-go breakfast and two travel mugs of coffee (decaf), I set off at 9 this morning, planning to be back by 2:30 in the afternoon in time to take Jared to work.
Ah, the best laid plans. I don’t think it’s exaggerating much to say that there were probably 90 separate pieces to that bed, from lumber and bolts and wooden pegs and screws, etc. And about 30 pages of “instructions” that were all pictures, no words. I think I suffer from some kind of construction dyslexia. No matter how many things I’ve put together over the past few years–and there are many–I almost always put something on backwards or upside down or something gets mixed up and I end up deconstructing what I had been constructing. Today was no different. Only you can perhaps imagine that with 90 separate pieces, the opportunities to get things backward were multiplied. At one point after having taken something apart twice, VERY early in the process, I threw things down cursing and sputtering, flailing around surrounded by boards and bolts and screwdrivers and all manner of tools and paraphernalia. Michal watched this spectacle before declaring that she was going out to procure food and that I needed to “take 5.”
It makes me smile now to think about the whole thing–such amazing drama over essentially nothing. While she went to get the sandwiches, I calmed down, took some deep breaths and looked yet again at the hieroglyphic instructions. Clarity arrived even before the food did. In the approximately 20 minute that Michal was gone to get the sandwiches, I managed to reassemble the thrice disassembled section (the entire right side of the bed) and actually had placed two major pieces that bolted the two sides of the bed together. I was well on my way to having it solved by the time she got back. Except for a brief moment of mother-daughter snarkiness during our lunch break, I quickly returned to good humor.
Bed instructions step one, repeated several times.
Given that it took almost two hours to complete Step 1, I was forced to concede that I was not going to get home by 2:30. I called Jared and let him know that he would have to get another way to work today. He took it with relative good grace. There is no easy, quick way for him to get from our house to his job 12 miles and nasty freeway traffic away. I’m not sure how he got there, but I’ll find out tonight. Anyway, with the pressure of having to be there by 2:30 off, I could relax and finish putting the bed together, with Michal’s willing if not always knowledgeable assistance. She put on some upbeat music (first James Brown, “I feel good” and other hits, then old Jackson 5 tunes from my teenage days) and we danced and had the bed put together in no time. It took less time to put the majority of it together than it had taken me to complete step one!
I am grateful for this journey I am on. More and more I am taking myself less and less seriously. Life isn’t meant to be experienced as drama. For a few minutes I thrashed around in the drama of not being able to figure out some silly, poorly produced instructions (before taking on assembling a loft bed from Ikea, I recommend meditating or going to your happy place or having a margarita.) Then, I was over it. And that’s some of what I’m learning to do. Let go of the drama. Take some deep breaths in the midst of the frustration, calm down, and move on. This is not yet automatic for me, and I might be thrashing around again tomorrow. But I’m learning to be patient with myself and if I can’t catch myself right as the drama is beginning, I’m starting to catch it in the middle before it spins itself out of control. With practice, I’ll be able to stop it in its tracks before it even gets going good. Practice makes perfect and I’m not even going to get hung up in the perfection–that’s even more drama. Nope, practice makes for sharper focus and that’s what I’m going for. Let it be so!
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